THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT

March 5, 2006

Genesis 9:8-17

I Peter 3:18-22

Mark 1:9-13

Year B

One of things I brought home from the clergy pilgrimage I took to Italy in 2000 was a photograph of a wall etching from the depths of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus. The etching is a dove holding an olive branch, the symbol of peace. It is a poignant thing to behold, there in the darkness of the catacombs, deep beneath the earth just outside of Rome. This simple, but beautiful dove looks almost as though a child had created it. I remember thinking when I saw it, how incongruous it seemed that it should be there, in the darkness, 250 feet beneath the surface of the earth, where so many early Christians were buried. Yet, isn’t that true of so much of what we hear in scripture; the dichotomy of so many situations and circumstances.

Take Noah for example. The picture in our minds of Noah, filling the Ark with creatures, comes right out of our childhood. Everything in the Ark seems cozy and warm; all the little animals marching up a plank to get inside the Ark. But once the door was shut and the rains came, it was a different story. I doubt if any Sunday school teacher had little children ponder those left on the outside, frantically crying out as the waters began to choke every breath from their lungs. So the first thing we are reminded of this morning is that the event of the Great Flood, written of in Genesis, is not a sweet story. It is not a pretty picture. It is a picture of death and devastation. It is the picture of disaster.

Scripture may tell us the rainbow was God’s promise never to destroy the earth again, and while maybe the world wasn’t destroyed earlier this year in Hurricane Katrina, some people’s entire world WAS destroyed. The world is still in a mess, just as it continued to be a mess after the Great Flood.

After God’s promise not to destroy the earth, it didn’t take the children of Israel very long to get back to their usual ways. Jacob would come along to steal his brother’s birthright. The children of Israel would fashion images of gold to worship. Herod would devise a plan to slaughter all male babies within a hundred miles, and Judas would sell his friend for thirty pieces of silver. Floods and famines, treachery and murder, happened and keep on happening, whether you read of it in scripture or the morning newspaper.

And just as there seems a dichotomy today between the glory of the rainbow and the devastation of the Great Flood, so is there a dichotomy between the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, his baptism by John, and his being driven into the wilderness. When Mark tells us Jesus was driven into the wilderness the translation literally means “hurled like a javelin”. The wilderness is a place of enormous danger. It is a place of broiling sun by day and numbing cold at night. Humans are not even at the top of the food chain there. Deadly creeping things rule. Status is nonexistent. To lose one’s way in the desert means almost certain death. Yet, it was in the wilderness that the children of Israel encountered God. It was their defining moment. It was there they found out who they were and who they were called to be.

And so it was out in the wilderness, in utter aloneness and vulnerability, that Jesus wrestled with what it meant to be Jesus.

Mark says it was there in the wilderness that Jesus was tempted by Satan. The word “Satan” in Hebrew simply means an adversary. So the first thing that we are told about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is that he went out into the wilderness to wrestle with all the adversarial things that sought to keep him from what God called him to do. He went there seeking to encounter God and be led by God. But it was not a comfortable spiritual retreat.

Scripture underlines that Jesus was tempted in every way as we are yet did not sin. But that does not mean Jesus was perfect, the way we usually define perfect. In Mark’s Gospel especially, we are shown that Jesus experienced all the emotions and frustrations that every human being experiences. When scripture speaks of Jesus’ sinlessness it is referring to the fact that the wholeness of what humanity was created to be is found in him. The call of Lent is a call to wholeness and authenticity. The call of Lent declares we are not capable of that without encountering God and doing battle with all that keeps us from God.

Covenant is the word the Bible uses to say that of all the things God could be doing with God’s time, what God desires most is a relationship with us. The reality of hell lies in our refusing that encounter, because who knows what God might ask of us. That is what Jesus faced in the wilderness and that is what we face in the wilderness as well.

The call to enter the wilderness is not to escape a corrupt or disappointing world, but to encounter God. Lenten discipline is not about our routing around in the dessert of life trying to find God. It is about our willingness to do spiritual combat with all that keeps God from finding us! When, like Jesus, we are willing to be led by God and to do battle with all that keeps us from what God calls us to do and be, we are also opening ourselves up to be empowered by God.

Through his own encounter with God in the wilderness Henri Nouwen came to the transformative realization that, as he wrote: “The long painful history of the Church is the history of a people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the Cross, being a leader rather than being led.”

So it’s no surprise that when Paul spoke of his conversion to Christ he said it was a little bit like being killed and being born at the same time. In order for us encounter God something must die in order that something might be born. As William Willomon writes: “Something must end in order that there might be a new beginning.”

That’s why Christian baptism is supposed to be a drowning, a burial of all that keeps us from God as well as a rebirth. In Lent we are called to look at how we have gotten that all wrong. Sadly, however, we still get hung up on what should we “do” for Lent.

In a Russian novel, by Goncharov, the hero, Oblovmov, is asked what he does. The question astonishes and offends him. “What?!” he says, “What do I do? Why, I am in love with Olga!” To him the question about what he ‘does’ is a question about his identity. He is a man in love – and that is who he understands himself to be. It would be a betrayal to answer the question as it was posed. He answers, instead, the question he should have been asked.

Entering the wilderness is about coming alive to our true calling to be lovers of God; to be willing to dance the dance of encounter with God. That’s why we need to go into the wilderness to confront our own adversaries; to ask ourselves, before God, the hard questions.

What am I turning away from? What am I unwilling to face? What is there in my life that I am unwilling to allow God to touch, to change, to make authentic and whole? That feels risky because it is about letting go of control and being willing to be led, as Henri Nouwen said. But, as Episcopal Bishop Barbara Harris once said, “The power behind you is greater than the task ahead of you”.

The promise of God in the rainbow is that the earth and all that is in it will never fall without God’s heart breaking. That is what is being said as Jesus was driven into the wilderness to deal with the wild beasts, all those beasts we know all too well.

No doubt Jesus wrestled with the risks, the cost, and the incomprehensible possibilities of what might happen. In his complete humanity there was no way for him to know exactly what might happen. But it was there he faced all the unknown possibilities, and when he walked out of that wilderness experience, like hammered steel; he was ready to face the rest of his journey.

While Jesus may never have slept securely once he started his ministry he did sleep peacefully, and so can we. Because whatever God calls us to always brings with it the promise that God’s embrace will hold us up and never let us go.

So maybe the little etched carving of the dove of peace, down in the bowels of the dark catacombs, is not so incongruous after all. And if that is true we need not fear going into the wilderness; to struggle with all those things that keep us from encountering God and being led by God. God is here to lead us through the storms, to lead us through deadly heat, to lead us through whatever may come our way. That is God’s promise. For remember, even if it rains until you think you are going to drown, do not despair. Look up. Look to all the rainbows of promise and the many angels that surround you. Then follow your eye downward to the shadow of a cross; which is the promise made good – and made good forever.

AMEN

The Rev. Virginia L. Bennett, D.Min.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

Edwardsville, Illinois